Circular cablegram D56 LONDON, 12 January 1944, 11.40 p.m.
MOST SECRET
Following for the Prime Minister. Begins-
My telegram Circular D.1085, 10th December. [1]
On December 16th, immediately upon his return from Africa,
President Roosevelt received the Chinese and Turkish Ambassadors
[2], the Egyptian Minister [3] and the Soviet [4] and Persian [5]
First Secretaries, in the absence of their chiefs, and His
Majesty’s United Kingdom Minister at Washington [6] (His Majesty’s
United Kingdom Ambassador being indisposed) and made the following
statement, warning them that they must not repeat to anyone what
he said.
2. He had been working very hard to prevent Indo-China from being
restored to France, which during the last 100 years had done
nothing for the Indo-Chinese people under their care. The latter
were still as poor and as uneducated as they had ever been and
this state of affairs could not be allowed to continue.
3. He thought that the Indo-Chinese who were not yet ready for
elective institutions of their own should be placed under some
United Nations Trusteeship which should take them towards the
stage when they could govern themselves, somewhat after the manner
of developments in the Philippines (the President did not make it
clear whether he was thinking of a United Nations Trusteeship for
all peoples in this category or whether the administration should
be in the hands of a single country or of all or several of the
United Nations).
4. The President went on to say ‘we’ would have great trouble over
this with the French, but that nevertheless it would have to be
done. At the recent meetings it had been decided that peace must
be kept by force. There was no other way and world policemen would
be necessary who would need certain places from which to exercise
their function without bringing up the question of changes in
sovereignty. He men tioned Dakar, which in the hands of a country
too weak to defend it or of a hostile country, constituted an
immediate threat to the whole of the Western Hemisphere.
5. The President referred, with pleasure, to the decision taken
with
Chiang Kai Shek [7] in Cairo that Manchuria, Formosa and
Pescadores should revert to China. (See my telegram Circular
D.1046 of 1st December.) [8] Korea, he said, would have to be
prepared for an elective government under a form of trusteeship,
while Japan would be com pressed into her own islands and would
receive various forms of treatment which would prevent her
becoming a danger again. See my immediately following telegram.
[9]
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1 On file AA:A989, 43/735/302. It noted a declaration by the
French Committee of National Liberation on post-war political
progress envisaged for French Indo-China.
2 Dr Wei Tao-ming and Mehmet Munir Ertegun respectively.
3 Mahmoud Hassan.
4 V. I. Bazykin or F. T. Orekhov.
5 H. Hadjeb-Davallou.
6 Sir Ronald I. Campbell.
7 Chinese President and, until 4 December, President of the
Executive Yuan.
8 Documents on Australian Foreign Policy 1937-49, vol. VI,
Document 340.
9 Presumably Document 14, although circular cable D57 (on the file
cited in note 1), summarising U.S. Govt commitments regarding the
future of the French colonial empire, was dispatched at 11.50 p.m.
on 12 January.
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[AA:A989, 43/735/302]
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